Unless we remember we cannot understand.
we may say that History develops, Art stands still
Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of...
If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is ...
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
We move between two darknesses.
The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that w...
Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.
